We're cheering on Hollywood's super heroic women this week. Here's Lynn Lee!
Geena Davis at Sundance this past JanuaryIf they’d made a Wonder Woman movie back in the ’90s, Geena Davis would have been on the short list for the lead role. Or if not, she should have been. Statuesque beauty? Check. Commanding physical presence and natural athleticism? Check and check. A convincing don’t-fuck-with-me quality, tempered by a divine set of dimples that suggest she’s not taking herself too seriously? Check and mate.
Davis’s premature relegation to the sidelines of Hollywood is one of the great recent WTFs for movie lovers and actressexuals everywhere. To be fair, maybe we should have seen it coming, given her string of box-office bombs, the fact that she passed up roles she probably shouldn’t have, and her reputation for not being the easiest to work with. Yet it’s pretty shocking, when you look at her filmography, to see how abruptly her movie career sputtered and stalled out round about the turn of the millennium.
She still does TV work, though, and continues to be an active force for improving women’s roles in the entertainment industry—including launching her very own Institute on Gender in Media a decade ago to help increase awareness of the issue...
But the fact that the issue is still real and omnipresent, a quarter-century after Thelma & Louise (as Davis herself has called out in recent interviews), underscores not just the wider problem of gender bias but the particular difficulties of being an actress with leading-lady star quality who never fit neatly in any of Hollywood’s standard leading-lady molds.
It’s always amused me that Davis became known in the ’80s for playing an assortment of ditzy, quirky, sunny-tempered girls (Beetlejuice, Earth Girls Are Easy, The Accidental Tourist). That’s because the first movie I actually saw her in was A League of Their Own (1992), in which she served as the surprisingly (and, for Davis, somewhat atypically) quirk-free, stable, and serious center. Nonetheless, she was the center (Tom Hanks’ presence notwithstanding), and the character I identified with and rooted for most strongly. Her Dottie Hinson may have been the straight (wo)man, the Goliath for Lori Petty’s overshadowed little sister to topple, the riddle that Hanks’ crass but ultimately respectful coach never quite figured out, but she was graceful, poised, and always a boss. That look in her eye when she catches a fast pitch and grips it with her bare hand remains, for me, the iconic Geena Davis don’t-fuck-with-me look.
We’d see that look again in Thelma & Louise (still her best movie), and with somewhat diminishing returns in her attempts to play a bona fide action heroine in the ’90s—in Renny Harlin’s legendary bomb of a pirate movie, Cutthroat Island (1995) and the preposterously silly, barely coherent (though despite that, rather entertaining) amnesiac-spy thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996). I can’t honestly say that those movies deserved to do better on their merits, but I can say that Davis was the best thing about them. Whatever you think of Harlin’s directorial skills, he at least had the right idea in building an action movie around his then-wife. Even as she threatens her captors as she’s getting dunked while tied to what looks like a water wheel, you know she means business, and these fuckers are going down. You laugh at the absurdity that surrounds her, but you don’t laugh at her. It’s a pity, then, that she never fully realized her potential as Geena Davis, action star; with more successful vehicles, who knows what she could have become? It’s true she was already pushing 40 by The Long Kiss Goodnight, which isn’t usually an age at which actresses begin their career as action heroines. But still…so much wasted potential.
Which leaves the question: who among working actresses today is best qualified to inherit the mantle of Geena Davis – that elusive combo of movie star, character actress, and action heroine – and, more importantly, succeed where she faltered? Jennifer Garner tried, but, alas, seems to be following Davis’ path to the margins of Hollywood. Halle Berry’s never been able to make herself into a convincing action star. Charlize Theron has, but (at least on screen) lacks that endearing goofball quality that Davis never really lost. Jennifer Lawrence might have it, but despite doing some of her best work in the Hunger Games movies, seems ready to hang up her action-heroine hat. Perhaps the reality today is that Hollywood still isn’t ready for a Geena Davis. And that’s a shame.